Linked List: July 6, 2010

Tuesday, 6 July 2010

How Many iTunes Accounts Were Compromised? 

Not many. Clayton Morris reports:

Apple told me that an extremely small percentage of users, about  400 of the 150 million iTunes users — that is less than 0.0003% of iTunes users, were impacted.  

To the question of whether the iTunes servers themselves were ever in any danger of hackery Apple told me that the iTunes servers were not compromised in any way.  

Nielsen Norman Group Studies iPad and Kindle Reading Speeds 

Bottom line: people like reading on iPads and Kindles; they don’t like reading on PCs.

HTC Revenue Way Up 

Up 63 percent year-over-year, thanks mostly to their spot as the world’s leading Android phone maker. A year ago, they were best known as the leading Windows Mobile phone maker. Times change.

Andy Zaky on the End of the iPod Era 

Andy Zaky:

The first chart shows iPod revenue from 2006 to 2010. The second chart is of iPod unit sales. The third chart details iPod revenue as a PERCENTAGE of Apple’s overall revenue. This chart is important because it unmistakably illustrates how the iPod’s impact to Apple’s recorded revenue has been on a decline since 2006.

It’s not so much that Apple’s iPod business is doing poorly, as that everything else — the iPhone and even the Mac — has grown. But the growth points to where Apple’s future is.

Neven Mrgan’s iPhone 4 3G Reception Test 

Neven Mrgan:

The only conclusion I can draw from these data is that the iPhone 4 3G cell signal reception is really inconsistent.

Indeed.

Mary Jo Foley on How Microsoft Is Busting Its Own ‘The Browser Is Part of the OS’ Myth 

I’ve never understood why Microsoft made this argument in the first place. (Via Slashdot.)

Peek at Under-Construction Philly Apple Store 

Glad to see construction is underway. See also: IFO Apple Store’s write-up on Apple’s just-opened flagship store in Opéra (Paris), and their photo gallery.

Bootstrapped, Profitable, and Proud: iTeleport 

37signals interviews Vishal Kapur from iTeleport, on funding the company entirely through actual revenue. Their formula: build great software (I use iTeleport and love it — it’s fantastic on the iPad) and charge a fair price for it.

Apple Responds on iTunes Account Fraud 

It seems pretty clear that what happened is that a small number of iTunes accounts had their passwords cracked/guessed — probably weak passwords. More, from MacRumors, including the salient point that there’s nothing new going on.

Lenovo Chairmain Says Apple Is Missing Out in China 

From the chairman of Lenovo:

“We are lucky that Steve Jobs has such a bad temper and doesn’t care about China,” Liu Chuanzhi told the Financial Times. “If Apple were to spend the same effort on the Chinese consumer as we do, we would be in trouble.”

Is AT&T Capping 3G Upload Speed? 

I’m seeing this here in Philly. Just a few days ago I was getting over 1 Mbps upload speeds on my iPhone 4; today it’s under 0.2 Mbps. Latency is bad, too.

Prefix or Posthack 

Eric Meyer on vendor-specific CSS prefixes:

We ought to praise vendors for using prefixes, and indeed encourage them to continue. Beyond that, I hold that prefixes should become a central part of the CSS standardization process. I do this not for the love of repetition, but out of a desire to see CSS evolve consistently. I believe that prefixes can actually accelerate the advancement and refinement of CSS.

Agreed wholeheartedly.

Fake 0.2 

New app from Todd Ditchendorf:

Inspired by Apple’s Automator application, Fake looks like a combination of Safari and Automator and allows you to run (and re-run) “fake” interactions with the web.

Power Users will love Fake for automating tedious web tasks like filling out lengthy forms and capturing screenshots. Developers can use Fake for graphically configuring automated tests for their webapps, including assertions.

(Via Michael Tsai.)

Emily Brill Investigates Jonathan Zittrain’s Financial Ties to Apple Competitors 

Emily Brill:

Professors at Harvard Law School’s influential Berkman Center for Internet & Society consistently take positions on hotly debated business issues in support of companies like Google, which favor a free-wheeling Internet culture and less control over intellectual property, and against companies like Apple and AT&T, which — at least when it comes to hardware like the iPhone — favor closed digital systems and stricter intellectual property rights. […]

What most readers don’t know is that the Berkman Center and many of its leading professors have financial and personal ties to Google and other tech companies — ties that are not disclosed when these academics speak or publish, and that I discovered after auditing a class with Zittrain.

Killer App for Flash Player on Android 

Exploiting security holes in Flash Player for Android to jailbreak an HTC Evo. See step 6, which directs you to this page on macromedia.com; the jailbreak script manipulates a Flash cookie while the browser is open. (Via Reddit.)

Jesper Thinks Apple Is Working on a New Language 

Jesper takes a guess:

After watching the eminently early and freely available WWDC 2010 session videos, I think my scales have finally tipped. It is my belief that Apple is definitely working on a new language to surpass Objective-C as their intended, primary, publicly recommended programming language, which I will call “xlang”.

I don’t know if he’s right, but I sure hope so.

Rentzsch on Pester 

Wolf Rentzsch on Nicholas Riley’s wonderful free reminder/timer app, Pester. I’ve been using Pester for years. A true hidden gem.